Why movies suck

Well, not all movies. Just the vast majority of them. Or at least the vast majority to which I've been exposed. Sturgeon's Second Law, which dictates that 90 percent of everything is crud, applies as much in cinema as anywhere else — maybe more so. And this comes from someone who loves the medium, though I love cinema in the same way that a parent loves a lazy, generally stupid child who occasionally rises from the couch to display a flash of brilliant promise. These moments come just often enough to allow me to me hold out the vain hope that the kid won't spend the rest of my life drinking beer and TiVoing things in the basement.

One complicating factor is that we're not talking about a thirteen-year-old, nor a thirty-year-old, nor even a fifty-year-old. The wastrel son that is film has had over a century to get his act together, and still, as Robert Altman said to Doug Aitken, "We're at the very beginning of what films can really be. We haven't come close to the medium's full potential yet. Everything is still so linear." Despite having done more than his part to move the form forward before he shuffled from this mortal coil, Altman's judgment remains accurate.

Reading Vernon and Marguerite Gras' compilation of interviews with Peter Greenaway, my conception of the problem grew much clearer. While I'm still not sure why cinema remains so stubbornly in its state of arrested development, I've now got a better understanding of the state itself. First, here's a Choice Thought what I previously quoted Greenaway as having (all bolding mine):

In an interview, you said that cinema is too important to hand over to the storytellers.

That statement has brought me grief, especially in England. It appears that English and, even more so, American films are perfect in recounting a straight line narrative. They achieve it through the use of suspense and asking the viewers to identify with the main characters. That accounts for all those psychological dramas.

I think that the greatest art works — and I exclude those found in film — have had far greater means at their disposal. Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure. Artistically, film is a very rich medium; it has so many indescribable possibilities, and hardly anyone uses them. It seems to me that the majority of directors make their films with only one eye open and their arms tied behind them. The capability of film to become an extraordinary and astonishing medium is completely ignored. One should not tell stories as straight line narratives. There are so many other possibilities, and film would only enrich them.

In 1985, he told Michael Ciment:

Cinema is only 90 years old and I would like to relate it back to its predecessors, which, in my view, are the visual arts. I know that others see cinema as more closely related to theater and literature. But that's not how I see it. It is quite possible that in the coming decades cinema will either transform itself completely or disappear.

In 1989, he told Andreas Kilb:

It's impossible for cinema to be a window to the world, a slice of life. Everything that I do is self-reflexive in this sense, filled with signs which emphasize the artificiality of the action, like the curtains in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover which are drawn apart at the beginning of the film and closed again at the film's end. My working methods and my cultural background are more Apollonian, rational — and have little to do with conventional narrative cinema. My stories are very classic and simply constructed; first, a prologue, then three acts, and an epilogue. For I truly believe that what matters is not what happens, but how it happens.

In 1991, he told Marlene Rodgers:

I'm not particularly interested in contemporary psychodrama — with all that pseudo-supermarket Freudian analysis of character which becomes so boring — that has now been going on so long, especially in dominant cinema, which itself seems to be simply an illustrational medium, illustrating novels all the time, not even twentieth-century novels but nineteenth-century novels. I mean, what film can you see that's actually taken cognizance of James Joyce, for example? I've made comments about cinema not reaching Cubism yet, but there hasn't even been an awareness of Joyce.

In 1992, he told Suzanna Turman:

I sincerely believe that in all cultural activity, content atrophies very rapidly, and all you're left with is form and strategy. Then there is a way in which the form and the strategy themselves become the content. I don't think you can get away from the fact that anything that moves through time has some sort of narrative. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten is a narrative — beginning, middle, and end. But I have a great distrust of narrative. I can write stories extremely easily, and I feel that narrative writing is extremely facile. I have an antipathy to the psycho-drama, too, which I think is too easy. I do feel that we ought to look for other ways of explaining the human condition, apart from this sort of pocketbook Freud — it isn't even Freudian, because it's still stuck somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, or associated with Jane Austen, for God's sake —

Hey, I like Jane Austen!

I do, too! I suppose the European novel took an interesting turn with her writing, but I still feel that cinema basically is illustration of the 19th century novel, ways and means of examining the world very much in the way that perhaps Dickens organized his narrative scheme. And, you know, American cinema is a bit like telling children stories, to placate them — make sure the moral code is all right, and now we'll tuck you up in the bed, and everything will be all right, give you a kiss, goodnight, see you in the morning.

In 1997, he told John Petrakis:

I feel that the cinema we've got after 100 years is in some cases not a cinema at all, but a history of illustrated text. The English Patient, for example. Why do people bother? Why do they spend money, patience, time, and activity perverting one work of art into another? We know cinema is very hybrid, very mongrel, and still hasn't found an autonomy for itself. But I don't think it should be used simply to illustrate literature.

[ ...]

I don't think cinema is a good narrative medium. If you want to tell a story, become a writer. Don't get involved in cinema. Cinema is about other things. I know we excuse cinema because it's not very old, but one of the great things about the twentieth century was the taking away what for many years had been regarded as the main props. So, melody's been taken away from music, figuration's been taken away from painting. And there's a way, I feel, that narrative should be taken out of cinema, so it can get on with what I believe it can really do.

That same year, he told Lawrence Chua:

In Asian calligraphy, we have the possibility of an image being a text, a text being an image at one and the same time. Wouldn't this be a good way to consider the possibility of a reinvention of cinema? I believe that cinema is in need of reinvention. In the West we have continually separated the image and the text, and one would imagine that cinema would be the ideal place in which to remarry these two notions. But alas, it does not seem to have been the case. The Pillow Book is another attempt to readdress my particular anxiety or disenchantment about a cinema which is primarily text before it can be image.

The essential problem is, I submit, a grotesque form-content mismatch. Then again, common filmmaking procedures pretty much out-and-out ask for it. If I'm pointing the finger, I'll point it at that bane of cinema, the standard-format screenplay. So many films are conceived dead as these stuttering, Courier New'd abominations, it's hardly surprising that they translate so anemically to the expansive artistic bandwidth of even the lowest-grade film. Pick up a movie at random, and chances are it's simply one of these hacked-out bundles of utterances whitewashed with the thinnest possible audiovisual layer. Greenaway is too kind. They're not illustrated novels; they're illustrated screenplays.

I recently read Rick Schmidt's Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices, one of the several books on budget movie production I've been schlepping around since high school. The main text is reasonably solid, but I found the foreword gripping. Written by the film scholar Ray Carney in his usual oft-criticized-as-acerbic style, it fires a salvo in, well, the war on cinematic mediocrity:

One of the most limiting aspects of American film is that the plot is all that matters at virtually every stage of the process. Movies are pitched, scripted and budgeted on the basis of the cleverness of their plots. In the directing and editing process, characterization, emotional nuance, mood and psychology are thrown to the winds to keep the plot zipping along from event to event. Filmmakers like Spielberg actually pride themselves on "telling a good story" in this children's-book sense of the phrase. The great works of literature — Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's plays — are not reducible to their plots. Only hacks like O. Henry and Agatha Christie confused narrative art with "telling a good story" in Spielberg's sense. No one ever sat through the classics of cinema for their plots. Who ever watched The Passion of Joan of Arc for its plot? Reduced to their plots, Ozu's movies are hokey melodramas. Plot has almost nothing to do with a great film's complex pleasures.

Comments

[MJ]

As you know, cinema is stubbornly sticking to narrative-driven films because people are programmed to love stories and it's a money-making business. Video games is another business where stories are becoming more key, and non-linear stories have a chance there...

But if you see cinema as closer to the visual arts than literature/theatre, perhaps it needs to become more elitist - or for there to be at least a genre of film is are more like the video installations you see in contemporary art.

Educating people to enjoy cinema on levels above story is going to be a helluva challenge :-) how many people actually attempt to really understand paintings? As opposed to consuming them in galleries because they know it's a cultured thing to do? And half the pleasure is seeing a one-of-a-kind object...

But I agree that plot has little to do with a film's more complex pleasures. It is, though, I think, a basic strand that very successfully holds the other complex strands together.

As you can tell I'm a writer, so of course I'm totally biased ;-) what films do you admire (that I have a shot of getting hold of!) that pulls off what you are saying successfully?

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Oh man, how could you not have put down "Amelie"? I watch that over and over again for her hair...her clothes...and just the basic richness of the movie.

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Has read all in detail, excellent blog! Everything is still so linear." Despite having done more than his part to move the form forward before he shuffled from this mortal coil, Altman's judgment remains accurate.